Interview With Roomer Travel CEO – Buy & Sell Nonrefundable Hotel Rooms

Roomer Travel is a website that allows consumers to buy and sell non refundable hotel rooms. If you haven’t already, I’d strongly recommend reading my review on the website. Gon Ben-David (Roomer Travel’s CEO & Founder) agreed to a short e-mail interview to answer some of mine (and your) questions about the website.

1. How long does it typically take for a name change to occur? Can people use Roomer for last minute bookings?

We have many last minute bookings – and after creating thousands of great experiences for our customers, we feel very confident in our ability to accommodate all types of bookings – last minute as well as bookings made a lot of time in advance.

2. Does the originally booker keep all of the rewards points/elite night stay qualifications or can this also be transferred?

It really depends on the type of hotel that the reservation was made at – every hotel has different policy, and we always try to accommodate the customers requests regarding rewards points – but it’s really up to the hotel.

3.  At the moment Roomer has a lot of inventory, obviously not all of this is from people reselling rooms. Where is roomer sourcing this inventory from and doesn’t it dilute Roomer’s main point of difference? 

Roomer is the secondary marketplace for travel – and we look at successful marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay as the kind of marketplaces we wish to be. While we are the only ones who hold the unique inventory generated by our users – we also offer inventory which comes directly from suppliers, hotels and other travel sources: we made this decision after many users came to us and asked us for rooms in location x in specific dates – after they had such a great experience with Roomer in the first time. We found out that it’s better to have all types of inventory in our website, in comparison to having only specific dates or specific locations, and we make sure that the level of customer service, support and user experience is the same no matter what the source of inventory is.

4. Which hotel chains does Roomer work with? Are there any large hotel chains that don’t allow name change reservations?

I can’t comment on this at the moment.

5.  If a user makes a booking and there is a problem at check in, what does Roomer do?

Roomer covers all bookings with 100% Buyer Protection – https://www.roomertravel.com/buyer-protection , which means that we will either upgrade you, book you a different room or refund you. Roomer has 24/7 support center which is available to our customers via phone, email and chat – and we’re committed to our customers and their experience.

6. Are there any plans to add any alerts? For example, let’s say I wanted to go to Hong Kong from January 9th till the 12th Roomer would then alert me if any rooms are added for those date ranges with a discount of at least 40%.

Yes, this feature actually did exist in the website few months ago – and we will launch it again after some cool improvements are added.

In total I had asked 11 questions, there were five questions left unanswered due to “Unfortunately I can’t comment further regarding the product roadmap”. Which is a fair enough answer in my opinion

1. How can Roomer users view how many referrals they have and the status of those referrals?
2. Why was the limit on referrals introduced?
3. What features does the team plan to add in the future?
4. At the moment Roomer does not offer a loyalty program, will this be added in the future?
5. Roomer is also not listed on any cash back sites, are they any plans to add an affiliate program in the future that would allow this?

Final Thoughts

First of all thanks to Gon for taking the time to answer my questions, I really appreciate it. I love the concept of Roomer Travel, I’ve used it once (basically just to see how smooth the check in process was) and would use it again. The biggest issue I currently have with it is the lack of alerts, if I could add customizable alerts and rooms popped up in areas I wanted to stay during the times I wanted to stay there I’d use the website a lot more often.

The decision to add rooms that aren’t added by users is probably a good one but I wish there was more separation. I’m not interested in seeing rooms from other third parties (or the hotel themselves) as I know I’ll be able to find the room for cheaper else where (especially when you take into account cash back portals and other OTA loyalty programs). A simple indication that a room was added by a user would be a nice touch, as well as the option to only search for these rooms. If Roomer can manage to get deeply discounted stock from hotel’s exclusively, then this makes less of a difference but I think this is something they will struggle with.

Knowing how name changes affect loyalty points earning and elite night stay credits is also a must if they want to grab a share of the “travel hacking” market. I imagine this is made difficult by the fact that it’ll likely depend who is providing the room, an individual or the hotel themselves.

I like their buyer protection and the fact that they give you a working phone number. I would like to see them update their plan B protection to state they will get you a room at the same hotel if one is available in the event of an issue rather than the current wording of “Roomer will offer you a new hotel room at either the same hotel or a similar hotel in price, location and ranking”. At the end of the day it’s difficult to judge the buyer protection without having first hand experiences of actually using it. Hotel sites all have best rate guarantees, but filing and getting these approved is almost impossible in most cases.

Overall I’m hoping that Roomer Travel can succeed, the more people that use this site the better. Thanks again to Gon for making himself available for this interview and best of luck to him and the rest of the Roomer team. Roomer is currently offering a $25 sign up bonus that can be used on bookings for more, if you already have an account you can refer friends and you’ll both get this $25 bonus (you’ll get yours after they finish their booking of $100+). Although you can only refer up to 4 friends, I’ve already hit my cap so share your links in the comments. 

If you have any questions or feature requests, let me know in the comments and I’ll pass them on. What are your thoughts on Roomer? Have you used them before? Was it a positive or negative experience? Let us know.